Going paperless with the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 document scanner

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At no point in my life did I think I’d fall in love with a document scanner. I always thought of document scanners as the sort of thing I was happy to know existed, but I was rather sure I’d never need — let alone grow attached to — one of these wonderful contraptions. Over that past few weeks exactly that happened though.

Everyone has used a flatbed scanner and at work most of us have used a refrigerator-sized photocopier with a built-in high-speed scanner, but not everyone knows about the wonderfully useful devices between these two. PDF scanners, like Fujitsu’s ScanSnap line and similar products from Canon and Brother, are the only way to go if an individual or small office has to scan thousands of pages of documents without resorting to a third-party service or spending an undue amount of time at a copy center (if those still exist).

With bottle for size comparison.

The ScanSnap isn’t just useful because it’s a document scanner, but because it’s an excellent document scanner. Also — I’m hesitant to call any office product like this cool — but Fujitsu has packed the maximum amount of coolness possible into this device. It’s compact, has a folding design, it’s fast, and it does it’s job better than it needs to every time its called upon.

At a current street price of $430 you’d expect this scanner to be able to blow through a lot of paper, but even after reading the specs, I was surprised to see it in action. The iX500 is rated at 25 double-sided pages per minute and it can hold up 50 pages in the hopper. That means you can blow through 50 pages a minute, making short work of any tax filing or TPS report, and you can do runs up up to 100 pages without reloading it. It does so in color, scans directly to PDF which it crunches down to tiny file sizes, and then exports to your computer, Dropbox, or mobile device using a surprisingly OK piece of software. It can connect wirelessly or with USB 3.0 so, yes, it’s expensive, but you are getting a rather nice package.

I recently have been trying to rid my life of paper — old documents from school, reports from work, the important personal documents that any person acquires after a lifetime of taxes, doctors, lawyers, and bills. My goal is to go from a diligent record keeper with my own personal filing cabinet to a paper-free minimalist. That’s easier said than done, especially for someone with an instinct for archiving, and it’s impossible without the right tools.

In my quest towards freeing myself of paper my only allies are a 3TB hard drive, a staple remover, an oversized shredder, an x-acto knife, and the ScanSnap. Things have been going particularly well, with the scanner rendering higher quality scans than I expected faster than I had any right to expect, all while taking up just a small corner of my desk (which seems so much larger without all those papers).

So far, after a few thousand pages, I’ve had just a few paper jams, which are easy to fix because the scanner can be opened up with the push of a button. It’s remarkably good at getting stacks of paper and sucking in just one at a time, despite imperfect placement or other forms of user incompetence. If pages are stuck together the scanner will recognize that, so you have a chance to fix things without missing any pages. Pages are kept surprisingly straight, despite being autofeed, and the scanner is intelligent enough to eliminate blank pages, so I won’t think a document is finished when I just need to go to hit “next.”

I could go on and on about the many fine attributes of the ScanSnap iX500 or how much I appreciate a tool that does its job so well right out of the box, requiring nothing more than a push of a button from me. This is by no means an inexpensive device, but it’s far too rare that I find a tool — let alone a piece of electronics — that does it’s job as readily and as capably as the iX500.